


A Wing and a Preyer

by A_Diamond



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Frenemies Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson, Getting Together, M/M, Misunderstandings, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Past Bucky Barnes/Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Pining, Polyamory, frenemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 08:38:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14849423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Sam’s had it with Bucky’s lynx daemon stalking his goshawk daemon. He could also do without Bucky constantly pointing out that the Falcon’s daemon is absolutely not a falcon. But the constant pouncing from shadows and leaping from rafters? It’s gotta stop. They’re not animals, there’s no reason Bucky’s daemon should get away with acting like one. It’s not even like they can blame it on the years of brainwashing and torture—according to Steve, Hal was exactly the same with Peggy’s daemon. And Bucky was nearly as much of a snarky dick to her, too, which isn’t fair: Sam’s not a threat to their relationship, much as he might wish he could be. It takes Steve an intervention (or three) to turn their bickering and all-out-brawling into the revelation that all this shit? It’s how Bucky and Hal flirt.





	A Wing and a Preyer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZepysGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZepysGirl/gifts).



> ZepysGirl: Thanks so much for your donation, your prompt and brainstorming, and your patience as I worked this out - I hope you enjoy the final product!
> 
> Zaphodsgirl: You're a star, always. Thanks for the great beta skills and even more greater title skillz <3 And for loving Sam and Bucky being little shits to each other as much as I do.

Sam and Redwing did not hate easily. He was a pretty easy-going guy, if he did say so himself, and his daemon was even less prone to holding grudges than he was. They tried to like people and see the best in them. Always had, and working at the VA had honed their empathic tendencies. Honestly, they were not hard to get along with.

All the same, it was pretty even money on which of them was going to snap and murder Hal first.

“What the fuck!” he shouted as Hal sprang down from the top of a cabinet to tackle Redwing out of the air. Redwing shrieked, flapping and scratching herself free in moments. She darted to perch on Sam’s shoulder, unharmed but ruffled.

They weren’t going to murder the devil-cat; they were gonna justifiably daemocide her.

“Barnes!”

The man didn’t answer and his lynx daemon sat upright in the middle of the hallway and stared at them. Odds were good that Bucky wasn’t even in earshot; he and Hal could withstand freakishly distant separation with no sign of discomfort. Sam had heard enough about it to know that it was something that happened to them while with the Russians, and he didn’t want to know more.

That didn’t stop him from thinking it was related to why Hal didn’t talk anymore, though, or that maybe she wouldn’t be such an unholy terror if she spent more time with her human. Then again, Bucky wasn’t much better.

“What’s even your problem?” he demanded, glaring at Hal. She nonchalantly flicked one tufted ear then rose to all fours and stretched, back arching and rolling back into a dip as she extended her forelegs. Settling again, now in a sphinx pose, she continued to watch them.

Sam raised a menacing finger in her direction, but Steve and Brigid rounded the corner before he could do more than that. Steve looked at him. Brigid looked at Hal, judgement written in the lines of her canine face.

“Really, Harriet?”

“Harriet?” All Sam’s ire flew out the window at that new morsel of information, replaced by delight and the tiniest bit of self-recrimination; that had to have been included in some of the histories of Bucky Barnes and the Howling Commandos that he’d never paid enough attention to. He could’ve known about Harriet from the beginning.

It wasn’t much, in the grand scheme of things, but at least he had a response for the next time Bucky smirked at him and Redwing and said, “You know a goshawk’s not a falcon, right?”

“Harriet!” Sam cackled again.

Hal’s ears flattened back as she glared, but then Brigid flopped beside her and started grooming her face affectionately, and she had no more time to spare on Sam or Redwing. They paired together perfectly, silver and white and dark gray fur blending where their sides touched. The lynx and husky were a matched size, too, and fit against each other like they’d been made that way. Just like Steve and Bucky did.

Redwing tucked her beak behind Sam’s ear, butting into his hair as his heart gave an unhappy stutter. He was happy for them—for Steve and Brigid. The shit they’d been through, they deserved their soulmates coming back from the dead. Even if Bucky and Hal could fuck right off as far as he was concerned most of the time, they made Steve smile like nothing else in the world, and Steve’s smiles were something else. A damn miracle.

And Sam wasn’t an idiot. He knew what it meant when seeing a guy smile felt like looking into the Afghan sun, just like he knew that crushing on a guy who’d burn the world down for his long-lost childhood sweetheart was a terrible plan. Especially when that long-lost sweetheart was just as devotedly protective, with an extra side of unstoppable assassin.

“Hey.” Steve’s voice was too soft, too concerned. The only way Sam could deal with it was to plaster the smile back on his face and wave it away.

“Just considering the choices we’ve made that led to being terrorized by a Harriet.”

He passed Bucky on the way back to his room, and for once didn’t even startle at the guy’s terrible habit of melting out of shadows—that time, the three-inch-square bit of darkness behind a support column. He was too fucking exhausted to bother with it, on all counts. Mentally, physically, emotionally: he was just done.

“Look, man, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove but I’m not playing this game anymore. I never was. Your daemon can leave us the hell alone.”

Bucky smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes; those stayed hard and assessing. Sam could feel them on him even after he shook his head at the futility of it and continued on his way. Later, when he was behind his own closed door, he still would’ve sworn the hot itch running down his spine meant he was being watched. Redwing didn’t settle easily, either, launching off his shoulder and flapping around near the ceiling. Even without the space to work up to a proper glide, it helped her work off some of the restless energy as she brooded.

“It’s not safe for us to stay here. We need to leave,” she declared at last. She alighted on her favorite windowsill perch and fixed him with her sharp eyes.

He stared back. “The ambushes aren’t great,” he agreed, “but as obnoxious as they are, I don’t think we’re in any danger from them. Other than, you know, getting my ass beat when I finally try and punch his face in.”

“I know you’re not actually this dense. I don’t mean physical safety, I mean living with two guys you’re pining after. It’s not healthy and you know it.”

“I’m not,” he started to say, but arguing with his own daemon was too far down the denial rabbit hole. Just picturing the looks he’d get from his vets if they caught him at it was enough to make him face reality.

His feelings about Bucky were a lot more complicated than what he felt for Steve, which had started out as a crush on the friendly, unbelievably hot guy running circles around him at the National Mall and only deepened from there. With Bucky, the first associated emotion had been terror. An absolute certainty that he was going to die and it was going to be an ugly death.

That had persisted through most of the fight, even when it took a backseat to the focus he needed to actually make it out alive. Anger had also made a few appearances, because brainwashing or not, he took it personally when someone tried to kill him multiple times. Somewhere in there jealousy found its way into the mix; bitterness that he tried and failed to suppress over the loss of any chance he had at pursuing something with Steve.

It was selfish as hell and he hated himself for it, but he also couldn’t help hating Bucky for it a little bit, too. It also hadn’t taken Bucky long to earn his resentment in all sorts of other ways, so that helped him feel more justified and less petty about it.

If that had been it, Sam could’ve coped. He would’ve worked through his hopeless feelings for Steve while keeping a wary eye on Bucky the whole time, because he didn’t trust him with Steve yet. That watchfulness had been his undoing, in the end, because the more he saw them together—the more he saw what Bucky was like when he wasn’t antagonizing Sam for no reason—the deeper into trouble he got.

James Buchanan Barnes was as smooth an operator as historical gossip made him out to be, and gorgeous too, but none of that won Sam over. What did it was seeing the work he put into an especially difficult recovery—no trauma was easy, he knew that and preached it as gospel at the VA, but Barnes had been through some major shit. The kind Sam had thought a person couldn’t come back from. Bucky’s progress was impressive as hell, and no amount of personal dislike could take away from that.

And when they weren’t aimed at him, Bucky’s smart mouth and quick sass kind of made it onto Sam’s top five list of Turn-Ons He Was Helpless to Fight, right after combat prowess and thighs like Captain Goddamn America. So Bucky had those going for him, too.

It wasn’t as easy or deep as he’d fallen for Steve, but it was there and getting worse by the day. It was getting harder and harder to mask his wince when Steve and Bucky were being sweet or horny all over each other and Hal shot him a pointedly smug look. Seeing as she had a feline superiority thing going on at all times, it was a real kick.

“Okay,” he told Redwing. She hadn't stopped staring at him. “Okay. Even if that’s true, and I’m not weighing in on that—”

Redwing actually laughed at him.

“I don’t want to leave. I’d still rather be here.”

“Yeah. I know.” She didn’t say ‘me too,’ but he heard it anyway and knew it was true. Her saying they should move out was like him saying he was going to punch Bucky or Hal: venting frustration but not actually meaning it.

They were pretty screwed.

 

When she wasn’t leaping from the shadows, Hal was sporadically underfoot—literally, and always at the worst moments. If Sam and Redwing had a bad day, it was almost guaranteed that they’d find Hal in their path at some point.

Sam had come close to stepping on her more than once when he turned a corner and found her sprawled out right in his way; belly up, a trap waiting to spring. Her clearly false look of innocence didn’t do anything to hide the fact that she was trolling for an excuse to savage his leg or something. At least he got a bit of satisfaction in her disappointment when he snorted down at her and said, “You know we’re never gonna fall for that, right?”

He’d sidestep as she rolled over onto her stomach and sniffed, then continue on his way.

Once, coming back from an exceptionally draining group—three people had cried, two had yelled, one had walked out and needed some follow-up one-on-one time—Hal blocked his way. Not with a baited belly trap, that time, but a wood and plastic rack full of colourful beads and shiny metal disks. It looked like a child’s toy, out of place in what passed for a super soldier bachelor pad.

Sam stared down at it. Redwing dropped off his shoulder, flapping twice to break her fall, and landed beside his feet. She hopped closer tentatively, splitting her attention warily between the toy and Hal, but Hal never pounced.

After a thorough inspection didn’t turn up any landmines or other traps, she nudged a bright red cube and ruffled happily at the way it clattered and spun. “Did you steal this?” she accused as she used her talons to space out the beads on the bottom row more evenly.

Hal swiped them all back to one side, purred for a surreal instant, then stalked off.

“That was... What was that?” Sam stared at the corner where she’d disappeared, trying and failing to find an explanation.

“Weird,” concluded Redwing. “But you should take it to our room anyway. I like it.”

Sam didn’t even remember how upset they’d both been until they were getting ready for the next group two days later.

 

He woke in the middle of the night. A little past the middle, actually; the clock he kept very close to his bed displayed 3:27 AM in very large numbers. Being able to look over and see it quickly, to immediately identify where he was while reeling from a nightmare, was worth way more than the ten-something bucks he’d paid for it at a big-box store. The panic that sight assuaged came right back in a rush when his eyes adjusted and he made out a dark shape right next to his nightstand.

“Fuck!” he yelled, flinching back. Redwing, huddled on his chest like she always was when he relived seeing the wings of Riley’s merlin, Ashley, start fading into dust, echoed his shout and clenched her talons dangerously close to grazing his skin.

Hal blinked at him. In the darkness, he only knew she’d done it at all because the light reflecting from her eyes vanished for just as long as her judgmental blinks always lasted. Her stubby tail was probably twitching, too, out of sight against the floor.

“What the fuck!”

The door to his room burst open—it had been closed when he went to sleep, and apparently Hal had not only managed to open it, but close it behind her—and Steve rushed in with his shield at the ready. The light from the hallway showed him to be wearing sweatpants and nothing else. It wasn’t exactly an image Sam needed after the crisis of pining he and Redwing had dealt with already—especially because, when Steve saw what the situation was and lowered his shield, things bounced.

Sam bit his lip and prayed for strength.

“This again, Hal?” Steve asked, his tone the same fond amusement that always got aimed at Barnes when he did something horrifically antisocial. Like that thing with the scammer selling fake magazine subscriptions. It had been effective, sure, but that dude was probably still inpatient at a psych ward somewhere.

Speaking of the mildly psychotic devil, Bucky strolled in at a much more sedate pace. He didn’t look at all surprised to find his daemon there, creeping on Sam; had probably known exactly where she was.

“What the fuck,” Sam demanded of him, since he wasn’t going to get an answer from Hal.

Bucky smirked and shrugged, leaning sideways against the door frame so the faint illumination hit his face and highlighted just how much he didn’t care. It was a familiar expression, one he was always wearing when Sam caught him looking, and gave away exactly nothing about his motives.

“She just likes you,” said Bucky. Hal flicked a tufted ear and leaned in to—to lick Sam’s leg. He had no idea what to do with that; maybe she just liked the cold, salty sweat on his skin.

“Just—” Sam scrubbed a hand over his face. “Just get out. All of you. I’m not dealing with this at three in the morning.”

Bucky was the first to go—of course he was, he’d already gotten whatever entertainment he’d been looking for out of Sam’s freakout. Steve looked more hesitant, but he didn’t make Sam repeat it. Since Sam didn’t think he was up for a conversation about why he wasn’t up for a different conversation, he appreciated that; especially when Steve said, quiet but firm, “Come on, Hal. They’ll be okay.”

That just left Brigid, who must have been standing in the shadows behind Bucky. “He wasn’t lying,” she said, “Hal really does like you.” But even the earnestness of her ice-blue eyes couldn’t stop Sam from scoffing.

“Well, she sure has a weird way of showing it.”

“Exactly.”

With that vaguely cryptic answer, she was gone. Sam thought about thinking about it, but he’d meant what he said about not dealing with it until later. He was going the hell back to sleep and everything else could wait. At least it kept him from dwelling on the nightmare, which didn’t come back to haunt him a few more times that night like it usually did.

 

When he woke up again at a much more reasonable time, he woke up with an epiphany. Talking to Bucky about Hal’s behavior hadn’t worked, but maybe that wasn’t for the reason he’d first thought. He already knew they weren’t as close as most humans and their daemons were; Hal seemed to spend more time away from Bucky than with him and didn’t talk to him any more than she did anyone else. He might even have thought they were separated if he hadn’t seen real separated pairs before.

Maybe Bucky hadn’t even told Hal to stop; maybe he’d egged her on, since Barnes hated him even if Hal didn’t. Or maybe Hal wouldn’t have listened even if Bucky did tell her to quit it.

Then again, if Bucky and Brigid were telling the truth and Hal really did like them, she shouldn’t have needed to be told in the first place. Unless all the years she’d spent without regular interaction made her think it was okay? That made sense with what Brigid had said. She was as much a trauma victim as Barnes; if her feral act was a part of that, he just needed a different approach.

“Except when Steve caught her in our room, he said ‘this again’,” Redwing pointed out when he explained his new plan. “Which makes me want to know when and why it happened before.”

“Which means we have to ask Steve.”

“Our other options are to ask Bucky or flee the country.”

He made a face. “I might’ve been too quick to dismiss that last one before, it’s sounding better and better.”

Redwing smacked him with a wing even though it had been her idea, so off they went to find Steve.

He was in the kitchen, which was the first place they looked: supersoldier metabolism required a lot of breakfast. Unexpectedly, Steve was alone; Brigid, Bucky, and Hal were nowhere to be seen, even though Steve could almost never be found without one, usually two of them all up in his space. Sometimes three—much more often than none.

“Morning, Sam,” Steve said with a smile, and his tone gave away that it was definitely a setup.

At least that made his task a little easier. He sat across from Steve, stole a piece of bacon from his plate, and crunched through half of it—of course Steve Rogers’s bacon was perfect, too—and asked, “So does your boyfriend’s daemon hate us or what?”

Surprise rocketed Steve’s eyebrows up, even though Sam had been positive Steve had prepared for the conversation. Then he started laughing, loud and full, so hard that his cheeks started to turn red. Sam stole another piece of bacon while he waited, because what the hell else was there to do?

“Sorry,” Steve finally gasped, rubbing his face, “sorry. It’s just—that’s almost word for word what Peggy said about it, too.”

“Peggy? They pulled this shit on Peggy Carter, are you kidding me?”

“Oh, for sure.” Steve’s fond grin made another appearance, but Sam couldn’t tell which of his wartime flames it was for. That had to have been a complicated situation, and possibly why Bucky and Hal hated Peggy and her daemon, but it just made it feel all the more unfair for him to be the target of the same animosity. It wasn’t like he was a threat to Bucky’s relationship with Steve the way Peggy had been.

Instead of giving him time to keep brooding, Steve said, “It drove Harrison absolutely nuts, let me tell you.”

Naturally, Sam had to ask, “Harrison?”

“Peggy’s daemon. An ermine with a gorgeous coat, and he was just so fastidious about it, even out in the field. So of course Hal was always tackling him into the mud or dropping leaves on him.”

“Wait, wait. Go back. Harrison and Harriet, really?”

Steve made a face, but Redwing wasn’t willing to let them get off-topic. “So she’s always been like this?”

“What do you mean?”

At a loss for how to respond to that without horribly insulting the love of the man’s life, and with Redwing unhelpfully mute at his side, Sam was silent long enough that someone else answered for him.

“They think it’s a trauma thing,” Bucky said from the doorway.

Sam just about jumped out of his skin. Twisting half out of his chair to look at the man, he asked, “Shit, Barnes, how long have you been there?”

“Sorry,” Bucky said—not, naturally, looking even the least bit sorry. Hal sat sphinx-like next to him, one shoulder pressed against Bucky’s shin, and stared at Sam without blinking. “Did you want to talk about how broken we are without us here?”

Ready to bite back with something equally sarcastic, Sam caught up with a reality check just in time to avoid saying it. Because, shit, Barnes was right to call him out. He had been pretty much getting ready to talk shit about the guy’s damage to his boyfriend, the boyfriend Sam was into.

Sam Wilson was not about that petty jealous bullshit.

“You’re not broken,” he said instead, just like he would’ve done for anyone who said that who wasn’t his arch nemesis and most disastrous out of his two hopeless love interests.

“Not saying you don’t have issues,” he went on in answer to Bucky’s snort, “but we just established you always have, that’s not news. And it doesn’t mean you’re broken. Hell, I’ve got problems, too—and only about a dozen of them are you.”

“Hear the first step is admitting you got one.”

If Sam hadn’t known better, he would’ve called Bucky’s tone flirtatious; Redwing flustered at it, feathers ruffling up around her neck and the tops of her wings. She shifted her weight, talons gripping and releasing the chair back; a more visible indication of uncertainty than Sam thought he was giving.

Judging by Bucky’s growing smirk, Sam thought wrong.

Then Hal sat up and her fur started going on end, bristling along her hackles. But her ears stayed neutral, her spine didn’t arch, and though her mouth opened, it looked more like a laugh than a snarl. Sam narrowed his eyes at her, not sure if it was a weird threat—though maybe not so weird for Hal—or if...

“Are you mocking us right now?” Since there remained zero chance of Hal doing anything but continue to stare at them, he turned the question to Bucky again. “Is she mocking us right now, is that what’s happening?”

It wasn’t like he didn’t know Bucky could laugh. He’d heard it before, even from a few rooms away, and it was so loud and easy that the only way he knew it was Bucky was that it wasn’t Steve’s laugh. Seeing it actually come out of the man was a different experience entirely, because he lit up like a kid on Christmas.

It was a look he’d worn in old pictures when hanging around Steve, but Sam had never expected it on the bulky, metal-limbed assassin he’d become. More fool him; it suited Bucky just as well as it ever had.

His beauty left Sam speechless a minute, which was a damn rare occurrence. In fact, the last time it had happened had been—

Steve crossed between the two of them, crunching his last strip of bacon, and brushed by Bucky on his way out. Brigid met up with him in the hallway, where she must’ve been lurking behind Bucky in a move more suited to Hal than her.

When Steve finished passing him by, Barnes’s laughter was just dying off, his eyes still locked on Sam. “I told you she likes you,” he said. Then he and Hal turned and followed Steve away.

Sam and Redwing sat in dumbfounded silence for longer than they’d ever admit to anyone else.

 

The next few days passed in quiet, insomuch as things could ever be quiet with Captain America and his common-law husband the Winter Soldier, plus whatever Sam was to them. Steve’s best friend, maybe, outside of Bucky. Bucky’s... maybe not worst enemy or bitterest rival. Not that he really thought Bucky considered him a rival, because Sam was a realistic hopeless romantic. No one alive could sway Steve’s devotion to Bucky, except maybe the late, great Peggy Carter.

But ever since that morning, he was feeling a little less certain that Bucky actually hated him. Sure, they still traded jabs pretty much every time they crossed paths, but above Bucky’s smirks Sam almost recognized the lightness that had come into his eyes when he laughed.

Hal kept stalking them, particularly Redwing. That didn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. Or ever. Sam wasn’t really holding out hope for ever.

Sometimes he or Redwing caught her and Bucky watching them without murder written across their faces. It was a little unsettling, mostly because try though he might, he couldn’t be sure if it was a new development or if he just hadn’t noticed it before. It wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to him, but he found himself devoting a whole lot of time to wondering what it meant.

Fortunately, Sam was pretty good at compartmentalizing. It helped when shit got crazy, like when he and Bucky ended up pinned inside a warehouse while Steve was having to fight whatever robot alien bad guys—it was hard to keep track sometimes—were running around outside. Whoever they were, they had him and Bucky boxed in pretty well, but despite their interpersonal drama they’d always been good at fighting together.

Hell, maybe it was because of their interpersonal drama; there was a reason he was so familiar with Barnes’s fighting style, after all.

So he thought nothing of shouting, “Cover me!” and throwing himself out the already broken second story window. He knew Bucky would do it and do it well, and it had to make Bucky just as twitchy as him to not be able to see what was going on with Steve. Bucky covered him, he took out a corner of the perimeter boxing them in, and they both made it out to help Steve. It was an all-around win in Sam’s book.

Less so in Bucky’s, apparently.

“What the fuck was that!” he shouted as soon as they were alone back at their place. He waved his metal arm behind himself in a vague, furious gesture, but Sam had a pretty good idea what he was talking about.

Barnes was right up in his space, too, towering in a way that was more than just the two inches and fifty-whatever pounds of supersoldier muscle Bucky had on him. The arm didn’t count.

Even Hal was growling. Bucky was pissed, far beyond any bickering they’d done in the past, but Sam wasn’t intimidated. He was way past being scared of Bucky.

“It was me doing my fucking job,” he shot back, voice calm even if his words were sharp. “You’re welcome and also what the fuck is your problem?”

“You,” snarled Bucky, not backing down. “You’re a goddamn problem. Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

“No, I was succeeding at keeping all of us alive. So again, what the fuck is your problem?”

“Throwing yourself at bullets isn’t how you stay alive.”

Sam stared and Redwing, who’d been circling in agitation, nearly ran into a wall. “Really? Really. Because that’s sure as hell what you and Steve do.”

He finally looked away from Bucky toward Steve, who had settled on the couch and was watching them with—amusement? He thought it was funny. Well, Sam would deal with him next.

His attention snapped back to Bucky when Bucky said, “Yeah. It’s what me and Steve do.”

It was impossible to miss the way he stressed their two names; the way he meant to exclude Sam. “Okay, fuck you. Not being a science experiment doesn’t make me useless.”

“It makes you—” Bucky’s face twisted into a complicated grimace as he shut down whatever he was in the middle of saying. He smacked the wall with his flesh hand; it was disconcertingly close to Sam’s head, but he didn’t flinch because he knew without even thinking about it that Bucky wouldn’t hit him.

“You’re fragile.”

It was almost like concern for his welfare. On a better day, Sam might have given him that. But he was still amped up and he didn’t need to deal with concern when it was shoved in his face like anger.

Before he could argue with that, Steve started laughing. Sam had been able to ignore the grin, but snickering required immediate attention; he was going to put an end to that shit. Bucky turned, too, and Sam caught a glimpse of his frown turning petulant and Hal stalking off. When Sam’s gaze locked on Steve, Redwing landed on the arm of the couch and peered at him, too.

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve said, only interrupting his chuckles briefly. “You ever gonna learn?”

Though Bucky protested, “It’s not like that,” the fire had gone out of his tone entirely. He didn’t sound like he thought he was going to win that argument.

“It’s exactly like that. You and Hal, the same god awful playbook as last time.”

“It worked last time!”

“Not even a little,” Brigid contributed.

Sam took the time to scowl at all three of them. “Someone wanna clue me in on what the hell you’re talking about?”

“I already told you, they’re putting the same moves on you they did on Peggy and Harry.”

Steve said it so lightly, still almost laughing, and that made it hurt even more. It was that dismissiveness that made Sam bristle and seethe and snap, “Yeah, I get it. I get it from him, but you? Man, if you wanted me gone, you should’ve just said instead of letting them run me off.”

“Run you—hold on.” On his feet in an instant, Steve crossed the room with Brigid close on his heels and hovered at Sam’s side. “This whole time, you thought they were trying to get rid of you?”

Sam looked over at Bucky before answering, ready with more pent up frustration and longing to fuel his anger, but once he had he couldn’t find anything to say at all. Bucky’s expression was torn open with devastation.

“Sam, I...” His voice as wounded as his face, Bucky took a long time to bring his eyes up to Sam’s and speak again. “I wasn’t, I swear. I thought you knew that, you just gave all that back so easy, I thought... I’m sorry, Sam. I’m so sorry. You gotta believe—I’d never do that to you. I never would’ve done it to Carter, Christ, I loved that girl.”

“You. Peggy.” Lost as he was, confused by the other men’s unexpectedly emotional reactions, Sam was starting to put things together. Because if Bucky and Peggy had been a thing—if Steve and Bucky and Peggy had all been a thing—and Bucky was treating him the same, well, that changed the situation completely.

“I thought you knew what Peggy was to us,” Steve said, just as soft and heartbroken.

“To you. Not to...”

It made sense, though, and answered some questions he’d had about the three of them back then. Sure as hell made him feel better about Steve’s attitude toward Bucky and Hal harassing him. Explained the looks from them he’d never been able to parse. But still—

“You two are a pair of absolute fucking idiots, you know that?” Even though he tried to be stern, his joy and relief must’ve come out through it because they both stopped looking quite so much like he’d told them Christmas was canceled.

Just to be sure, he prodded Bucky in the chest and asked, “So that was you flirting? That’s your idea of game?”

Bucky shrugged and smirked hesitantly. It was the same shrug and smirk Sam had seen dozens of times, the one he always thought didn’t reach Bucky’s eyes, but now he could finally tell why. Those were preoccupied with being the Barnes version of sultry.

“This is a fucking disaster,” Sam sighed, scratching at the back of his neck. “For the record? Your concept of wooing sucks. You’re just lucky I love you morons.”

As he pulled Bucky in by the front of his tac vest, he thought he heard Steve say, “We really are.” It was hard to be sure, though, because Bucky was a hell of a distracting kisser.

Then someone large and furry leaned in against his leg and a face pushed into the hand that wasn’t tangled in Bucky’s clothes. Bucky’s demanding lips fell away on a gasp, his body arching into Sam’s and his eyes closed in a mask of pleasure. When Sam looked down and away, it wasn’t hard to tell why; he pushed his fingers deeper into Hal’s fur and she and Bucky both shuddered against him.

Brigid nosed in, deliberately brushing against Sam and Bucky as she nudged Hal away so that Steve could crowd in instead. “We never wanted to hurt you,” she said, but not to Sam. Glancing past Steve’s broad shoulders, he saw the two of them curling up with Redwing on the couch. Her barred white and gray feathers fit perfectly with their coloring, hints of Hal’s silver and Brigid’s charcoal, like she’d been meant to be there all along.

A rough palm pulled Sam’s attention back to Steve, then Bucky’s palm ended up somewhere else, and—talking could wait, he supposed.


End file.
